Secret forums

[lupin84]

yep basically like that

Ok if that's the case then why not split it by the theme? For example, when I used to play Sims I logged onto the forums to look for downloads. They were split like this:

Downloads
skins
meshing forum
objects
buildings

Easy, if I'm looking for skins I want to see all skins together. It makes more sense that way. :)

[BIG TIME]

I'd completely forgotten about this post. :blink:

Everyone has good points, but I still wish there was a simple way to have a forum that was accessable by only logged in members who knew where to find it, instead of seeing that's it's there on a drop down navigation menu.

Invision has enough of my money that they could at least consider it. :)

[riven3d]

Ok if that's the case then why not split it by the theme? For example, when I used to play Sims I logged onto the forums to look for downloads. They were split like this:

Downloads

skins

meshing forum

objects

buildings

Easy, if I'm looking for skins I want to see all skins together. It makes more sense that way. :)

i have it that way for member items, but we have staff that prefer it to be their own section for what they make, and the members actually prefer it the way i have it. weird community i know. but its also easier to link to each persons section than having to link to each post they have, some of them have 500 items and that grows daily

[JayX]

When I first read this post, I agreed with everyone else.. do it thru permissions or something.

Then randomly it hit me in work today.. it would be a lot of fun simply as a social experiment. I think I now understand the reasoning behind it.

You give 10 people the information that if you goto id=666 or something, there's a hidden forum. Its up to them what they do with it. Then watch things unravel. All it takes is one user to "blab" it in a public forum, and everything these guys thought was secret is suddenly revealed.

Whilst not something that would last the long run, I'd be interested in doing this on my userbase.

[ellawella]

A feature like this would be pointless, IMO. I'm also fairly sure a similar effect could be achieved using <if> statements in the appropriate skin templates to not render forum links in certain places if the ID is one you want to keep secret.

[Trel]

That doesn't work. If you try to enter the URL manually you get a missing files error because the forum cache ignores any forums you can't view, even if you have read permissions. It's rather annoying because when 2.0 was announced, this was going to be a feature, and I built several parts of my site around that being the plan, and then the feature never materialized, so I had to hack around it.

I see what you mean, I could've sworn it used to work though.

[Alahmnat]

A feature like this would be pointless, IMO.

I use IPB to run a fan community and information archive for the Myst series. The archive and fan fiction (library) sections both store their data in the IPB topic and post tables. I use the IPB member system to manage users across the entire site, and that makes things a lot easier on me. Because I have specialized ways in which the data for the archive and library are displayed (the library, for instance, has nested comments that are tucked away when not being viewed so as not to detract from the flow of the story), duplicating that data in the forum, where it doesn't belong, is pointless. However, I use IPB's forum permission masks to determine who can do what where within the archive and library sections, so read, reply, and upload permissions all need to be accessed and verified for those forums, even though members can't see that they exist on the forum listing (nor do I want them to). However, I can't use the compiled forum cache that IPB supplies on my custom-built pages because it filters any invisible forums from the list, regardless of the member's read/reply/upload permissions. So, I have to use the source data, which is a bigger and somewhat more unwieldy data set than the compiled one, and I want to use the compiled one because that's what you're supposed to use.

The way I use it, enabling the forum to compile the invisible forums into the cache isn't a huge advantage, but it's one that would let me use the proper cache data and save me from having to do a bit more working-around the problem when it really shouldn't be a problem anyway. IPB 2.0 was supposed to have invisible forums as a feature... it was even listed as a "gotcha" on the support forum back in the day, but somewhere along the way, the feature vanished, and when I asked about it, I was told that the feature had been removed, though I never did find out why.